Thoughts on systems safety, software operations, and sociotechnical systems.
Something that has struck me funny recently surrounds the traditional notion of availability of web applications. With respect to its relationship to revenue, to infrastructure and application behavior, and fault protection and tolerance, I’m thinking it may be time to get a broader upgrade adjustment to the industry’s perception on the topic. These nuances in the […]
UPDATE: I’ve added a short section on the topic of sponsorship. I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t […]
While searching around for something else, I came across this note I sent in late 2009 to the executive leadership of Yahoo’s Engineering organization. This was when I was leaving Flickr to work at Etsy. My intent on sending it was to be open to the rest of Yahoo about what how things worked at […]
Read more Convincing management that cooperation and collaboration was worth it
Ben Rockwood said something last December about the re-emergence of the Systems Engineer and I agree with him, 100%. To add to that, I’d like to quote the excellent NASA Systems Engineering handbook’s introduction. The emphasis is mine: Systems engineering is a methodical, disciplined approach for the design, realization, technical management, operations, and retirement of […]
One of my apprehensions in moving to New York from San Francisco was a common concern: why would I move from the ‘epicenter’ of the web to a place where it’s not? There’s been lots written about startup hub cities, and innovative web metro areas, but the fact of the matter is that New York […]
I guess I’m late on getting to this, but How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook is excellent. Let me start with this: I don’t think I can overstate how right-on this paper is, with respect to the challenges, solutions, observations, and concerns involved with operating a medium to large web infrastructure. I found this […]
Domas makes something more useful than I bet most would think: http://mituzas.lt/2009/06/26/uncache/
Via kottke: some good examples of doing rough math in your head, causing you to guess about assumptions all along the way. IMHO, being able to do this is one of the things that makes a good web ops person. The examples might be “useless”, but the process is invaluable.
So now there’s chapters 1-4 on Safari RoughCuts. Which means if you don’t mind shelling out the dough, you can take a look at what I’ve been getting up early for every day for the past few months. The working title is “The Art of Capacity Planning” and it’s meant to be a no-nonsense description […]
Awhile back, I said I’d love to have a tool that would allow me to peek inside filesystem cache and tell me what files (or pages of files) are inside. Well Peter Zaitsev points to the fincore tool, which comes pretty damn close: you give it a file, and it will tell you which pages […]